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Finding the Right Fit: A Leadership Selection Model for the Redesigned Organization

Guest post by: Jennifer Loftus

Article Overview: Over the past several years, companies across every industry have sought ways to improve profitability and service while decreasing costs. As labor expenses usually account for the single largest segment of the company's budget, downsizings are one of the first options that senior executives consider when trying to cut costs. By Kenneth R. Cohen, Ph.D.

Finding the Right Fit: A Leadership Selection Model for the Redesigned Organization

Over the past several years, companies across every industry have sought ways to improve profitability and service while decreasing costs. As labor expenses usually account for the single largest segment of the company's budget, downsizings are one of the first options that senior executives consider when trying to cut costs. Although reducing headcount does produce immediate budgetary savings, it is reported that these downsizing initiatives seldom achieve their desired, long-term goals of increased profitability and greater efficiency and productivity. Research also suggests that downsizing's current popularity is not because it is the most effective method over the long term, but because it is the easiest to do administratively.

In this drive to cut costs, companies often lay off employees without giving sufficient attention to the human talents, which their organizations will need in order to survive. Unfortunately, statistics reveal that most organizations fail to recognize just how much of an impact their management staff can have on the organization's productivity, efficiency, quality and overall morale. That's why it's not surprising that after their redesigns, those same organizations often fail to achieve what they set out to achieve!

Some of the more common problems associated with downsizing's include:

§ The organizations require their survivors or remaining employees to do even more work than before.

§ The selection practices for determining who stays and goes are poorly planned and typically prove to be ineffective.

§ Undesirable side-effects of re-engineering and downsizing include diminished employee morale, increased cynicism, and shattered loyalty.

§ Many organizations that have laid off people have hired them back for other jobs. The latest human resources euphemism, de-termination, refers to the process in which they rehire people who they previously terminated.

In a change situation, companies must give equal attention to the management of their human resources as well as their other assets in order to be successful. When companies do downsize, they must make sure to allocate resources to those employees who stay with the company as well as those to be let go; the impact that remaining employees will have on the company's future cannot be underestimated. Proper workforce utilization in the new organization will be key to the organization and well conceived human resource strategies must be implemented to ensure a successful transition. Outlined below, is the approach that one local organization successfully applied to a recent reorganization.

A Case Study

In order to be proactive and to prepare for survival under managed care and capitation, the senior executives of a local health system sought to restructure their organization. They recognized that with fewer people in the management ranks, each of their new leaders would be required to do even more than they had before and possibly with less resources. They understood that the best way to maximize the design's success was to ensure that each of their new leaders was well suited to their new role. They invited me to assist them in the development and implementation of their selection processes.

To identify the unique requirements for success in each senior team member and middle management position, I interviewed the CEO and the redesign team members to identify what challenges people would face in each of the new roles. We talked about what they were going to be expected to do, and I asked a series of questions to get a clear picture of what the leadership style of each new person would need to be.

Then, at least two people were asked to fill out a standardized behavioral profile for each position. This profile asks specific questions, which identify their perceptions of the required style for someone in each position. For example, it looks at how direct, persuasive, and decisive this person must be and how much juggling of simultaneous tasks the person will be expected to do. For each of these positions, we compared at least two people's perceptions of the style requirements, just to ensure that nobody would be accidentally "set up" for conflicting expectations.

On the basis of the information obtained about each position, I tailored a series of interview questions to assess what the internal prospective candidates had done related to what the position required, how they went about doing it, and what was most important to them in their work. We also developed essay questions for the prospective new leaders to complete to identify how well they understood some of the important issues, how well they communicated their thoughts, and to identify their related experiences. They were also required to interview with the senior team members as part of the selection process.

We anticipated that the new leaders, for example, would need to be able to deal with a high level of ambiguity and that they would need to be able to handle and resolve conflicts. They would have to be able to forge ahead and make difficult decisions in the absence of any clear criteria as to whether or not they were doing the "right thing."

To supplement the comprehensive personal interviews, each of the prospective candidates completed a standardized behavioral profile. These assessed their career values, personal style and interpersonal motives. When systematically compared with the profiled requirements for each position, these helped the redesign team to decide which person would best "fit" each new role.

Then, I facilitated the selection team meetings in which we compared and discussed our ratings for all of the candidates for each position. The criteria used included the essay ratings, the senior team members' ratings of the interviews, previous performance ratings, their previous accomplishments, my ratings of their personal interviews and their behavioral profile match results. No one factor, such as an interview or the essay, served as the sole resource for these very difficult decisions.

The redesign team demonstrated great commitment and confidence in the selection processes. It proved to be well thought-out, thorough, fair to all parties concerned, and effective in achieving the desired results. Not only will it help to satisfy the long term needs of the system, but it also ensured that those selected were "custom fit" to their new roles and given the unique opportunity to pursue their strengths in more than they had before.

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Article Tags: budgetary savings, cynicism, downsizing, employee morale, euphemism, headcount, human resources, human talents, labor expenses, loyalty, management staff, productivity efficiency, productivity research, profitability, sect, segment, senior executives, survivors, term goals, undesirable side effects



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